mgo.licio.us

"The face of the operation is Briatore (referred to exclusively in the film by his colleagues and angry, chanting detractors as "Flavio"), an anthropomorphic radish who spends most of his time at QPR plotting to fire all of the managers."

At press time, Harbaugh had sent Michigan’s athletic department an envelope containing a heavily annotated seating chart, a list of the 63,000 seat views he had found unsatisfactory, and a glowing 70-page report on section 25, row 12, seat 9, which he claimed is “exactly what the great sport of football is all about.”

c) You have to be as entertaining on air as Liz Crowe or your introductory segment will be 2 minutes, and most of that Brian vamping while trying not to look annoyed.

Seriously though I've been looking for the right sponsor for our Podcast for a long, long time, and when Liz left the beer company she was working for to break out as a consultant and real estate agent, I approached her specifically for this, and made the price a secondary concern because she's the right kind of sponsor. She is, like Harbaugh, herself at full volume all the time, and part of the fabric of the Ann Arbor and Michigan Athletics community. With most of the things I sell we're just helping them market their thing because we have the right audience to market their thing. But this is one of those things where it's more like the sponsor wanted to help us and can justify it if a handful of MGoBloggers use her as their real estate broker.

The podcast is a marketable thing that a lot of our advertisers have been interested in; it's not like it took us this long to find a sponsor; it took us this long to find Liz.

Brian used to go out there once a year around now for the alumni association's thing; I don't know if that event was discontinued or he just didn't get asked this year. We are doing other things with the alumni association (announcement to come). We also did an event with Todd Howard the night before the 2013 Northwestern (firedrill field goal) game that I put together. We had planned on doing that again, and had the venue chosen and everything, but Michigan was so unwatchable leading up to M00N that we canceled it.

Maybe we'll do one after the season. Anyway if/when we do it'll be the second the Chicago Alumni Association Club asks us because they are an excellent group to work with. I think they're coming into town for Northwestern (homecoming) this year.

One of the keys to all of this is Nebraska isn't leaving the Big Ten; everybody is joining the Big Ten, formerly known as the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives, so that for the sake of TV rights and whatnot all the powers are negotiating as one entity, and scheduling each other.

I know it's a pipedream. What I don't want to see is the organic method of growing from a bunch of conferences into a league, because all that does incentivize the current conferences to snatch up any program bigger than a MAC school in a colonial land-grab, which is exactly how we found ourselves in a 7-team division with Maryland and Rutgers while Iowa and Wisconsin and Purdue come around less often than Utah.

The conferences grew organically well enough when television was regional and limited to four networks, and declaring a national champion was just a nerdy postseason excercise between professions that have to pay half attention. Today conferences are billion dollar corporations with their television networks, yet theyr'e still functioning under a system that expects them to be faculty representatives from elitist, non-profit educational institutions. The NCAA had their chance to become a true regulatory body, but instead chose to act more like an industry trade organization*.

The best thing for college football right now would be to acknowledge that the regional conferences that grew out of the 20th century are anachronisms worth preserving, like historic neighborhoods or whatever. Without that familiar structure the whole enterprise is at risk of becoming too desaturated, i.e. an NFL-lite, which is a crappier product fewer people will care about. When ESPN inevitably defaults on whichever round of promises it has to make to secure the TV rights to the last bastion of un-DVR'able entertainment, the BIG SIX or POWER SIX or whatever you want to term it will be in perfect position to cut Fox and Disney out of their revenue stream and make what they're making now by charging $5/month and selling ads themselves on a streaming college football channel.

The Big Ten is just the body out of convenience; the organizing structure of any major conference is sufficient to expand to include the 60-64 schools that operate truly professional-level (i.e. highly profitable) football enterprises. Technically everyone joins the Big Ten, or joins a new conference that handles all the "conference" stuff for the group, and is such a tour de force in college athletics that the NCAA has to kowtow to it.

I have no problem trying to fit Baylor and TCU into this (TT might be a stretch since their school's athletic budget is MAC-like despite the school's history). I only left them out because I thought a Texas-based mid-major conference would make for some rockin' good regional football.

Part of that is I hate to break up some great Texas rivalries. You can build one helluva mid major conference out of Baylor and TCU SMU Texas Tech and Rice. Fill the bottom with UTSA maybe North Texas maybe Tulane. Historically Texas and Texas A&M refuse to go anywhere without their little buddies.

I removed the section on relegation. These schools have long traditions against each other even if they were not competitive. I would hate to lose Indiana even for a year just for the sake of recognizing 1 or even 5 good years out of say Bowling Green.

Rather I capped the conferences at 11 and left spots open for expansion. If the Big East wants to add Rutgers or the Pac Ten want to add Utah there's a mechanism, but that is their only expansion and it forces their teams to all play a 10th conference game instead of an out of conf opponent.

We are working on a system where anyone logged in to account we mark as spam is ported to our old-old-old server that runs a superslow copy of the site except with an ad service that only runs invasive ads, and there's zero virus protection, so anyone who tries spamming us ends up having their spam computers locked into 50-minute load times and a gazillion software attacks.

And Bo shouldn't be over Yost unless we're taking racial prejudice into account. Leach beat OSU 4 times but every other QB on that list is a better passer. This is pretty much opinion. But yeah, Hart over Harmon and Wheatley as a 2...?

Ernest is friends with my brother too. I see your criticisms of Ready Player one, but I was actually sick of all the references after the midway point but then I thought the story took off, and I was impressed that he managed to actually bring the "your dream comes true" theme to a satisfying conclusion. I think the deux ex machina was self-aware; the whole point is it's a game and meant to function as one. I'm 50% through Armada and I think Cline was so disappointed by people not understanding this that he's making it too obvious (or perhaps the entire point) in this book.

We never really figured that out. I went with "plays as they would on your team" because I think it's more interesting to draft system guys for a system and whatnot. But here in the early rounds it's just a grab for superstars because at the end of 2014 nobody's saying "well if Hackenberg played behind Brian's offensive line..."

Every fan of every team makes all of these same statements about why their school is better, and totally clean too.

Fact is the athletes are picking between heavens. Most campuses are beautiful. Most support staff are top notch. FBS coaches are among the top 200 in their profession. NFL talent comes out of so many schools that which coaches develop a position best has to mean less than what that individual player is made of (not that it doesn't matter, especially w/ quarterbacks). A little something extra makes a big difference because there isn't much difference between schools.

As for fans, this site's existence when every other indie team site but 11 Warriors can't support even one blogging career speaks to something unique about Michigan fans' dedication. I have a hard time imagining there could ever be a Grantland for Just Clemson.

Depending on what section you sit in though I'm sure you can encounter some pretty quiet old farts in Michigan Stadium. We even have a name for them: Blue hairs.

Labels man. Ask yourself this: what do you call a guy who took money from some school then signed with Michigan anyway? Think that never happened with someone on the roster right now? Cut every "cheater" who broke an NCAA rule and there won't be many athletes left.

This is why I blame the NCAA first and foremost. Whenever you find a thriving black market for something there's always a shitty someone making the regular market not work.

In certain cases it's pretty clear. This is one of those cases. Clemson is one of those schools. Be mad at Michigan for not playing the same game as everyone else or be mad at the players who take liquid love over a minor preference in school choice, or be mad at the NCAA which creates all this madness. Pretending it doesn't happen is just naivety for the sake of sanctimony.

The charter schools are taking a few students. But the bigger effect is we built for a temporary population disruption.

In the 1960s, 85% (that's ridiculously high) of Bloomfield Hills homes had school-age children. Today that's under 50%. Those numbers were repeated ad nauseum in the local paper/e-newsletter (Patch) during the merging of their high schools.

Farmington won't be exactly like that--iBloomfield Hills was built almost entirely after the war and immediately filled with vets starting families, whereas Farmington was a thriving farming town for a century before it became a suburb. But that illustrates why, despite the population not being as hard hit as most of Michigan, these districts are still downsizing.

A bit of school funding history: up until I was in college (and Engler was governor) your property taxes went right to the school district. Communities like Ann Arbor, Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, and Farmington voluntarily raised their property taxes to create elite schools. The rule itself though ultimately created an effect of really good schools in affluent areas and awful schools in poor areas, which isn't really fair considering the state should be providing a good education to all of its citizenry. So the state pooled everybody's property taxes into the state fund, shifted half of them to prisons, and doled out the rest evenly. In response these communities started passing regular bonds. Every few elections there's a bond issue on the ballot, everybody winks at each other, and we pass it, and that money can't be touched by the state. But it does raise the price of living here, because paying off the "bonds" is effectually a permanently increased property tax. It means if you're planning on sending your kid to private school, you can save money by buying a house in another suburb.

School choice is a politically charged thing that affects everywhere because there are parents who prefer privitized institutions everywhere. I don't think it's a primary effect in this particular case because the #1 reason people live in Farmington in the first place is the public schools. West Bloomfield is right smack in between Farmington Hills and Bloomfield Hills, but WB has relatively crappy (read: "just pretty good") schools, and far lower taxes because they don't pass school bonds.

I'm not advocating. I'm trying to explain what's going on in my community.

We have half as many kids as when all four schools were built, and one routinely has the air conditioning break down and leaks all the time. We pay out the nose in taxes for school bonds to make sure our schools have a huge flow of money, but we've been falling behind Birmingham and Bloomfield Hills lately even though we all do the bond thing to pay for public schools that equate to private schools. That's because they've downsized. BH went to one high school. Birmingham renovated both schools and sold off a big chunk of Groves (my alma mater) to be a Michigan State satellite. The competition for young families in these burbs is fierce and school quality is #1 on the list. So that's why this is coming up.

Like anywhere in the Midwest there are some poorer and some richer neighborhoods, but on the whole we're talking about a pretty affluent, education-obsessed suburban community that built for the baby boom and has been a bit oversized ever since that ended.

There's a social component, since over time the schools have tended to become somewhat racially and economically segregated. When we do inevitably downsize to three schools, I imagine it will be a good opportunity to undo that.

I live in the Harrison district; most of the families in our neighborhood send their kids to North already. Harrison's football program is great, but you can move a football program pretty easily. As for a dilapitated building that looks more like a prison...

I couldn't take any more Buckeyes. All of our teams are going to have some of those stains on them--mine included--but at that point I needed to infuse the draft with some maize and blue, badly.

Also keep in mind the people drafting have some access to practice reports, and lots of practice hearsay. Not saying practice equals game, but the more the coaches and other players keep telling friends, family, and anyone in earshot this guy is for real, the more I tend to believe it.

When most of the games were at noon, and a few were still at 1? Hell no. I was a nice drunk like the rest of college students, but even I respected the "wait until you don't taste your toothpaste anymore before you have a beer" rule of morning drinking, and by the time the day was day enough to start imbibing you almost had time to finish two drinks before walking down to the stadium.

The flasks (or in my case a bottle of coke that was 75% not coke) were the only way to get a buzz unless you were a truly committed drinker, and to be honest, we are all still University of Michigan students.

Getting on TV was still a relatively new experience, and affecting what so many people were watching was kind of a thrilling thing. You'd see the rolls of toilet paper flying down after the first touchdown of the game and think to your young self "wow it would be so cool to be the guy who threw the toilet paper roll."

It really did look festive, like instant confetti or ticker tape. Anyway they stopped when I was 8 or 9 so I never got to throw a roll of TP.

Marshmallows

I was definitely around for this tradition. It was 99% college students being inebriated (sneaking alcohol or a joint into the stadium was pretty easy pre-9/11) and wanting to throw something harmless. A lot of the mallows went at other students--friends sitting a few rows down and a section over, or a group of girls you walked in with.

But there was a mini-game of trying to disrupt the TV crews and the opposing band with them. You tried to aim it so your mallow would pass as close to in front of the camera as possible to screw up their shot, or once they started to bring clear plastic shields, you tried to thunk it off the shield or lob it over. Also by the late '90s the TV crews had these big sound-catching clear plastic radar/dome things, which were as tempting as an opponent's sousaphone. I don't recall there being any real point to the marshmallows. Just a bit of goofy gameday atmosphere.